Israel’s New Center Was Once Its Far Right

THE INTERPRETER

NYT

September 12, 2019

Six years ago, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, profiled a new hard-right, nationalist political party that was shaking up Israeli politics: the Jewish Home Party.

The article’s premise was that Jewish Israelis were split over whether to formally occupy the Palestinian territories in perpetuity. Jewish Home, which overtly opposed peace with the Palestinians, was putting pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the right. Mr. Netanyahu was seen as unsympathetic to Palestinian independence or autonomy, but also as driven more by political self-interest than by ideology. He publicly feuded with Jewish Home over some of its more hard-line positions. That year, Jewish Home won 12 of 120 seats in the Israeli legislature, the Knesset. This appeared to signal the rise of a new Israeli right and its potential split with Mr. Netanyahu over whether to make permanent occupation of Palestinian areas more or less official. Israel’s unpopular center-left parties, meanwhile, tended to avoid the issues related to settlements and the future of the Palestinians as much as possible. Today, things look very different. Jewish Home has only three seats. Its former leaders joined Mr. Netanyahu’s government, then left it to start new hard-right parties that failed to win enough votes to join the Knesset at all. It’s not that support for formalizing a permanent occupation has waned. It’s that it has become, in Israeli politics, more or less a matter of consensus — even, among Jewish Israelis, a core precept of national identity. On Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu announced that, should his coalition win next week’s election, he would move to annex all Israeli settlements in the West Bank as well as the Jordan Valley, which runs along the Jordan border. This would annex about one-third of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It would also reduce the West Bank to an enclave surrounded by Israel, such that the borders of any future Palestinian state would effectively be controlled by Israel. Six years ago, such a move might have looked like a rightward lurch by Mr. Netanyahu to galvanize right-wing voters and keep them from voting for parties like Jewish Home. But something telling happened just after Mr. Netanyahu’s announcement: the Blue and White alliance, Mr. Netanyahu’s primary challenger from the center-left claimed that it had the idea first. Take a moment to absorb that. A proposal that only a few years ago would have constituted a far-right challenge to the right-wing Mr. Netanyahu is now something that Mr. Netanyahu and the center-left are fighting to claim. In other words, for all the understandable focus on Mr. Netanyahu’s political calculus, there is also a deeper story here about Israeli views and politics shifting so far right that Jewish Home’s politics went from representing the rightward fringes to the political center. Polls support Mr. Netanyahu and Blue and White’s apparent calculation that Jewish Israelis support overt annexation of Palestinian territory, which would not only kill virtually any possible peace deal, but put huge numbers of Palestinians under permanent Israeli control. A recent poll found that 48 percent of Jewish Israelis support annexing all of the West Bank territory known as Area C, which constitutes an area about twice as large as what Mr. Netanyahu has called for annexing. Only 28 percent of Jewish Israelis were opposed. Polls suggest that these policy preferences may represent a much deeper shift in Jewish Israeli attitude. Annual surveys conducted by the Israeli Democracy Institute show a gradual shift among Jewish Israelis over whether the country should put its Jewish identity or its democracy first. Growing numbers say that the two identities exist in tension and that Israel should be a Jewish state first and a democracy second. Pew polls have found that 48 percent of Jewish Israelis said yes when asked whether “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.” Almost half said they would not want to live in the same building as an Arab family. Those attitudes have been around for a few years. But they are now forming the foundations of Jewish Israeli political consensus. Michael Koplow, policy director of the Israel Policy Forum, an American think tank, sees the genesis of this moment a little differently, writing on Twitter that Mr. Netanyahu was simply “electioneering.” But the result is largely the same. “This is precisely how the fundamental window on this shifts,” Mr. Koplow wrote. “Instead of a conversation on whether annexation is smart or stupid, bad for Israel or good for Israel, every one across the Israeli political spectrum will accept this new baseline and annexation becomes normal.” Whatever brought annexation into Israel’s safe political center, its arrival there will make actual annexation significantly likelier. So does the Trump administration’s tacit support; it has challenged neither Mr. Netanyahu’s pledge nor his claim that Mr. Trump will support him in carrying out that pledge. This would go well beyond killing the viability of any Palestinian state or a two-state peace deal, which had likely happened already. It would further erode the rights of Palestinians, potentially in perpetuity. And it would more formally make Israel into what those polls suggest many Israeli Jews want it to be. Israel could still be a kind of democracy in this vision. But it would define democracy as majority ethnoreligious rule, and would require enforcing the demographic dominance of that majority through discrimination or even expulsions. There have been many such countries in history. But they are not typically considered full democracies, and they often end up estranged from countries that are. And the democratic compromises rarely end at imposing majority rule — a political system designed to enforce secondary status for ethnic minorities tend to do the same to political minorities, meaning people who express dissenting views or otherwise challenge the status quo. Giving up full democracy comes with serious costs for everyone, even the majority group. But, were Israelis to decide they are willing to make this compromise in order to preserve a specific national identity, they would not be the first people to do so, and they would probably not be the last.